Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the premiere of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet at Telluride Film Festival. The adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s death-clouded meditation on the origins of Hamlet went down a storm at the Colorado event, but it was Jessie Buckley, heartbreaking as Agnes Shakespeare, who received the most vigorous praise.
A good five months out from the Oscars ceremony, premature tipsters declared her (correctly, as it transpired) unbeatable in the best-actress category.
The comparisons with Telluride 2026 could hardly be spookier. Andrew Scott, a fellow Irish performer, arrived there last month as the star of another film about Hamlet that also sees the protagonist engage with mortality.
Simon Stone’s Elsinore focuses on Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor best known from the film Chariots of Fire, as he prepares to take over from Daniel Day-Lewis in Richard Eyre’s storied 1989 staging of Hamlet at the National Theatre in London. Charleson, who had Aids, managed 24 hugely praised performances before the illness overcame him.
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The reviews for Scott could hardly have been warmer. “Andrew Scott triumphs as Ian Charleson,” Dave Calhoun wrote in Screen Daily. Variety felt he gave “an astonishingly layered and moving performance”.
A starting gun was fired in the Hollywood Reporter. To that point, Scott Feinberg regarded John Malkovich, star of Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, as “the clear front-runner to win the best actor Oscar”. Not any more. “By Friday evening, when Elsinore had its world premiere in Telluride, I was forced to revise my hypothesis,” he wrote.
Art is not a sport. Grading films by their performances at awards ceremonies is a vulgarian’s game. But there is no escaping the attention around the Oscars. Celebrating their centenary in 2028, they remain the gongs that matter the most. Should Scott triumph in best actor he will join a list that includes Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando and on and on.
Who is the greatest film actor never to have won that Oscar? Maybe Peter O’Toole. Maybe Richard Burton.
Scott will have opportunities for some throat-clearing annoyance over the next few months.
“I’m going to make a pitch for getting rid of the phrase ‘openly gay’,” he said with a wry smile during Oscar season in 2024. “It’s an expression that you only ever hear in the media.”
The Guardian, shortly after Elsinore’s Telluride premiere, minded its language as it wondered if he would become “the first out gay man to win the best actor Oscar”. The Independent, alas, had missed the memo. “A win would make Scott the first openly gay actor to win the prize,” it explained this month.
Expect more of this as the weeks progress. Expect nobody to speculate about him being the third “openly Irish” performer to win the lead-actor prize.
So is the win sewn up? Catherine Shoard certainly thought so in that Guardian piece, writing that he is “almost certain to take the prize next spring”.
This is the view of neither the bookmakers nor the quaintly obsessive fanatics who contribute to awards sites all year long. One of our busiest turf accountants has had Malkovich and Scott joint favourites at 11/8. Over on Next Best Picture, a smoothly run awards site, nine of 17 contributors have Malkovich winning and six have Scott taking the prize. (Matt Damon for The Odyssey and Tom Cruise for Digger garner one vote each.)
A lot may change when the critics’ circles and the professional guilds begin handing out nominations in a month or two, but it does look as if we have a gripping two-horse race on our hands.
The shape is deceptively familiar. Malkovich, sly and eccentric in the McDonagh film, is, at 72, the “overdue veteran” who is set to finally get his prize. Scott is the young gun on a first nomination.
Deceptive? Well, yes. Scott, born in 1976, has been delivering strong performances for a quarter of a century. He made his screen debut in Cathal Black’s film Korea, from 1995. He secured worldwide attention on TV as a sprightly Moriarty, in Sherlock, from 2010.
No stranger to the chatshow couch, he has, over that period, showed great capacity to charm and divert interviewers. As the awards season progresses, that charisma will win over more and more voters.
It also matters (though it shouldn’t) that his character in Elsinore is more empathetic than Malkovich’s dying CIA killer in Wild Horse Nine. Mark the Dubliner down as marginal favourite.
Another great Irish Oscar moment might await. The most common practice over the years has been for the previous year’s winner of best actress to present that ceremony’s best-actor award. That would have Buckley passing over the statuette. Not a dry eye in the country.
